Archive for the ‘Team’ Category

After 7 years and growing to 70 people as a bootstrapped company, at the end of 2013, Tasktop made a decision to raise external financing. We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved as a bootstrapped entity and the innovations we’ve created including Mylyn, the task-focused interface, co-authoring the Change Management portion of the OSLC specification, the DevOps integration bus Tasktop Sync, and Software Lifecycle Integration. I am very proud of the organization that I’ve helped build, and the cool thing was that we could have kept growing without raising money. We made a choice because we felt that the opportunity to change how software was built was so big and the foundation we had put in place was so solid, that it was time to add a catalyst to our business. Also, our customers and partners wanted more from us than we could give to them organically so to grow commercially at the pace that the market was demanding, we felt the funding was needed.

Now as you know, wanting funding and actually getting funding are two different things. We were quite gratified as we went through the process that there was significant interest in the team we had built and what we had accomplished to date.

Today, I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve raised $11M. The primary focus of this investment is to expand the commercial part of our business. Over the past 7.5 years, we’ve created technology that drives tremendous value to our customers. When companies purchase Tasktop Sync or Tasktop Dev, they get software that pays for itself in the quarter it was purchased in (contact us to walk you through how Tasktop can drive significant returns for your organization). We need to get these innovations into the hands of even more organizations so that more of our colleagues who build software for banks, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, government, retail, and the like can do it at the increasingly rapid pace demanded by today’s marketplace. We are proud that our customers get increased visibility into their software manufacturing processes, see improved collaboration between the various stakeholders involved in delivering software and get home to their families in time for dinner because they’ve been so productive during the day. So we will grow geographically, adding more local presences around the globe (in many cases with our growing partner ecosystem).

We will also grow the breadth of our integrations portfolio so that we will provide coverage for the top 80% of the market leading tools in every category we support (project/portfolio management, requirements management, Agile planning, change management, test / quality assurance, and help desk / ITSM). Finally, we will evaluate adding integrations into adjacent markets based on customer demand. In essence, we have raised funding to do a lot more of what we’ve been doing. That also means we will maintain the discipline that allowed us to bootstrap the business through the ups and downs of the past 7.5 years.

John Thornton

The round was led by Austin Ventures, the VC in my home state of Texas. With over $3.9B raised over the course of 10 funds, Austin Ventures has been the most active investor in Texas. We’re excited to be adding John Thornton to our board of directors. John has been a VC for Austin Ventures for the past 25 years, even leading the firm for a number of years as the managing director. John’s ability to reach into his decades of experience in enterprise software stemming all the way back to his Tivoli and BuildForge investments to some of his other investments like SolarWinds, Datical and ITInvolve will help us navigate the growth we will be going through over the next few years.

Mike Satterfield

We also syndicated the round with Yaletown Ventures, the most active VC in Canada. Mike Satterfield will be representing Yaletown on the Tasktop board after spending about a year as a board observer. We’re thrilled to be continuing to get Mike’s experience working with enterprise software companies. He has already been critical to helping us in recruiting in Vancouver as well as helping us navigate some of the challenges we’ve faced as a Canadian company working on a global stage.

I’m also excited that my friends at the Capital Factory also chose to participate in this round. Both John and I are mentors at the Capital Factory, so this investment comes full circle for both of us.

I want to also say that I am proud that we’ve done it as a Canadian company. Mik Kersten, Gail Murphy and Rob Elves started this company 7.5 years ago out of the University of British Columbia. UBC has been a huge part of what we are, what we’ve been and what we will be. I’m proud of the partnership we have with UBC and am proud of our organization who takes time to give back to its roots. There are so many other people who have made a difference en route to this milestone for the company e.g., Rizwan Kheraj and all of the folks at the NRC, Bill Tam and the folks at BCTIA, and Mike Milinkovich and the Eclipse Foundation.

We also want to thank our customers, our partners, and our friends in the media and at analyst firms for their support over the past 7.5 years in allowing us to enter this new chapter of our company’s growth.

Joining Tasktop as a business analyst in September 2013, I was tasked to learn about the intricacies of the software delivery process while doing my part to help the company work toward its goal of improving that very process. While at first this seemed like an overwhelming undertaking, it turns out that Tasktop has been a great place to do so.
Our Vice President of Product Management, Nicole Bryan, often states that building software takes a village. As a business analyst, I regularly interact with the many members of this village and have seen how the contributions of each combine to create our own software solutions. This interaction has revealed not only the importance of each unit, but has also underscored the principal reasons for Tasktop’s existence.

When I first pursued a career opportunity at Tasktop and learned about its technology, I thought to myself “If the disconnect between teams using different tools is so pronounced, why wouldn’t someone focus on building a single piece of software that could be used by everyone involved in software development and delivery?” If such a tool existed, the need for integration would cease. (And the company that built it would make a lot of money.) Tasktop seemed to be doing well, though, and the position seemed interesting, so I happily joined when I was extended an offer, eager to learn about the world of software development.

And oh, how much I have learned. I now realize how naïve a notion that the development and large-scale adoption of this theoretical all-inclusive tool was. While I knew there was a disconnect between teams, I didn’t realize just how many teams were involved in software development and delivery, the high volume of which would make developing an comprehensive tool extremely difficult. I now see that software development and delivery involves more than Engineering and QA. Product, Business Development, IT, Management, Sales, Solutions, and Marketing, among others, are also at its core.

While developing any all-encompassing tool would be difficult, developing a high quality one that satisfied every team seems like it would be next to impossible. Before starting at Tasktop, I not only underestimated the number of teams involved in software delivery, but also did not fully grasp the fact that different types of teams (Product, QA, Engineering, etc.) have not only drastically different needs, but also different desires in terms of the functionality and mental model of a product. As I’ve seen at Tasktop, people with different inclinations and talents tend to have distinct preferences and to work in particular ways—and this is at a company that is small in size compared to many of its customers. Satisfying all of these predilections in a single tool would be quite the feat to accomplish.

Finally, I failed to discern just how engrained people could become in using a certain tool. The tools we use to do our job define our basic workflows and fundamentally affect our day-to-day activities. And if a given tool is serving your team well, why would you move to something else? Working is the software industry is demanding enough without having to learn a new tool simply to do your job. The bottom line is that change is hard. This is true not only at the team level, but also at the organizational level. Migrating any team to a new tool would be an expensive and exhausting effort and would significantly disrupt work; migrating all teams to this tool I originally envisioned would be all the more difficult.

As it turns out, developing such an all-encompassing tool would not only be a challenging endeavor, but would also be less than ideal. The need for integration will always exist. But this is not a bad thing. With solutions like Tasktop Sync, our partners can build tools that focus on solving problems for a particular set of individuals, rather than tools that fruitlessly try and help everybody. Though varied, the resulting tool landscape offers a strong set of options for practitioners involved in all parts of the process.

The beauty of Tasktop Sync is that it allows each team the freedom to use the tool they choose from this landscape, a valuable affordance that I only now understand, having lived the experiences of our customers first hand. The insight I’ve gained while working at Tasktop has given me an appreciation for the fundamental need for a software lifecycle integration strategy that defines processes and connects disparate tools and teams. It has also led me to empathize with the multitude of other knowledge workers involved in software delivery across the globe, an empathy that drives the work of myself of my colleagues everyday.

So, go ahead and keep working in your preferred tool–We’ll worry about the cross-team integration, and you won’t even know we’re doing it.

Tasktop is connecting the world of software delivery – now that was an opportunity I just couldn’t refuse!

I’m really excited to have joined Tasktop. The company’s mission and products are near and dear to my heart, and I’m so pleased to be working with such a talented, dedicated and genuinely nice group of people.

It’s interesting though, that as I think back on the roadmap of my career, it seems that all roads led me to Tasktop; it’s just that until just a few weeks ago, I didn’t realize it.

Of course I was aware of Tasktop; the company is widely known for its ALM integration tools and platforms and, most recently, the introduction of the Software Lifecycle Integration framework. But for me, it was more than just awareness, it was admiration. As a former UX developer, I found the “task-focused interface” work of co-founder and CEO Dr. Mik Kersten very intellectually stimulating. As a former software engineer and engineering manager, I have to love a company that removes some of the process tedium from daily life, while making the whole team more efficient. And, as a (fairly) savvy business person, I love the idea that we’re not competing against the leaders in Application Lifecycle Management – our goal is to help everyone be more successful.

In my opinion, if you’ve ever worked on a software development team that was hindered by your colleagues working in silos, you have to admire Tasktop.

But the confluence didn’t stop at admiration.

I’ve been at this “software development” thing for, um, a while. I’ve had the pleasure of working at some truly innovative companies, and (with a tinge of modesty), being a bit of an innovator myself. So as I look at what Tasktop brings to the party, and I recount my own experiences, being called on to lead Tasktop’s marketing team feels like it was almost inevitable.

I started in technology as an engineer. I’m a bone fide, diploma-carrying computer engineer/computer scientist. My first roles were in what was then called “human factors,” but we now call User Experience. I worked on all sorts of interesting systems, from radar and air traffic control to quality management software for systems that test printed circuit boards and (in my last coding role) workflow or what’s now known as “Business Process Management” (BPM).

Eventually, I became the VP of Marketing and Product Management at that BPM company, InConcert (a spinout of Xerox research), where pivoted to use our workflow product as a way to integrate disparate systems. We initially concentrated on the telecommunications industry, because in 1996 deregulation led to a flurry of new telecoms companies that relied on each other (and each other’s systems) to operate.Â The first business process we tackled was “service activation,” the process of establishing a customer’s account. At each step of the process (or task), we wrote “agents” to connect to the various systems needed to complete that step. It worked well, got terrific acceptance and eventually TIBCO software bought the company.

But the thing that always bothered me was how hard it was to write those agents. Back then, CORBA was the leading technology for this sort of thing.Â Yes, tightly-coupled CORBA!

Fast-forward a few more years, and I had the opportunity to work at IONA (yes, the CORBA company!), when the up-and-coming technology was web services.Â Going from being tightly coupled to loosely coupled was, without question, the way to go for integration technology. IONA adopted web services as an integration technology, and I had the pleasure of bringing those products to market.

When I left IONA, I left the world of integration technologies for a while. But I continued to work on products for software developers. In fact, one of my favorite jobs was with Rational Software.

Back then, Rational Software was an independent company and the leader in cross-platform software development tools. As a director, I was proud to lead all aspects of marketing for ClearCase and ClearQuest. Once IBM acquired us, I lead all product, industry and solutions marketing for the entire Rational Brand. While Rational itself was a substantial software company (around $800 million in revenue a year), I learned quite a bit about enterprise scale after joining IBM! Not only were our customers some of the largest in the world, but we were part of a very large company.

After IBM/Rational, I worked at few other notable development tools companies such as Progress Software and, most recently, SmartBear software.

In between all those jobs, I started my own consulting company, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that many of my clients catered to software development teams. I’ve had all sorts of roles: software engineer, engineering manager, consulting engineer, product manager, and now joining Tasktop; this will be my third company where I’ve been at the helm of the marketing team as VP of Marketing.

The role at Tasktop is a wonderful confluence of several things I hold near and dear: advancing the state of the art of software development and delivery, the integration of disparate systems and delivering a terrific user experience.

I couldn’t be more excited to be part of a team and a company that is so well positioned to make such a substantive difference is the software development and delivery process – and to do our part to change the world through better software.

Well fortunately, there was no fiscal cliff (though the U.S. government did nothing more than my 4 year old son; it just kicked the can down the street) and somehow there was a day after even though the Mayan calendar just stopped. As such, I feel a little more comfortable writing a retrospective blog that is as much about the past as the future…

2012 was an eventful year for Tasktop. We kicked off 2012 celebrating our 5th anniversary. In this blog, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect less on Tasktop’s outwardly facing accomplishments that we highlighted in the press release and focus more on the behind the scenes aspects at Tasktop.

I truly believe that when we look back on 2012, it will be viewed as an inflection year for Tasktop.

Eclipse Mylyn and Tasktop Dev keep doing their thing. Driven by Android development and Asian programmers, Mylyn rode the wave of Eclipse adoption in 2012 and regularly sees 2+ million downloads per month. Tasktop Dev continues to make Eclipse and Visual Studio software programmers who use commercial tools (Mylyn is a great free choice if your development tool stack is open source) more productive.

2012 was the year that we validated Tasktop Sync as a viable solution for connecting the world of software delivery. Not only did we demonstrate the need for tools integration but also exposed how integration matters for process, collaboration and reporting. It’s been fascinating to learn how big a problem we have unearthed. With our Mylyn roots and our partner ecosystem, Tasktop is uniquely suited to address the challenges of tool heterogeneity which is ever-present and growing in the enterprise struggling to deliver high quality software in a timely manner.

As a bootstrapped company, we continued to grow steadily. We moved our corporate headquarters in Vancouver. We are thrilled about the new office because it allows us to create the team environment that is conducive to the innovation we are driving and the challenges we are trying to solve. We also opened an office in Austin, TX where our US headquarters are located and where many of our partners (CA, IBM, Micro Focus / Borland, Thoughtworks Studios, Smart Bear, etc.) and hopefully future partners (Planview, BMC, etc.) have a presence.

As we strive to do every year, we added some of the best and brightest young minds in the industry to our staff, and are proud to continue giving back to the educational system that has been so good to us as company through our active internship and co-op program. In addition, we added some grizzled veterans (I can’t say grey haired because some of them don’t have any hair) like Lance Knight, Dave West, Nicole Bryan and Jason Baldy. All of this has resulted in an organization that is inspired to solve a big problem, enjoys celebrating victories, has fun as a team, can be silly with each other, but has the organizational maturity to deliver high quality software for our customers and partners. At the end of the year, we added our 50th employee.

I never thought this day would come, but I can proudly announce that this fall I have joined the team at Tasktop! I am the 50th Tasktopian. My story started a long, long time ago when I was writing my first Java programs. At that time, I looked for a tool that would help me focus on my job without spending too much time on setup and javadoc reading. Eclipse had it all: quick fixes, content assist, fast search, syntax highlighting, you name it.

Years passed, and although my requirements have not changed much, my projects got bigger, the number of files increased tenfold, and I started to feel lost. This is when I discovered Mylyn (known as Mylar at that time), and used it to regain my programming efficiency. I have been a big fan of the tool ever since and can’t think of any other Eclipse add-on that makes as much of a difference in my everyday work.

In the meantime, I was lucky enough to start working on the Eclipse project itself. Becoming part of the open source community around Eclipse was an eye-opening experience. Watching all those smart people sharing thoughts and contributing patches, I finally understood why the tool is so great. I have been involved in multiple projects on the Eclipse Platform, including JDT, PDE, JGit/EGit and Orion, and have received commit rights to some of them, which is a recognition that I’m proud of.

Throughout my journey, I always held onto my motto that “to be the best, you need to learn and play with the best”. This is what prompted me to apply for a position at Tasktop Technologies. Now I’m proud to be part of the team,making the lives of thousands fellow programmers better, and I can’t wait to see how my journey with Tasktop will continue to unfold.

A room full of developers and students, cans of beer loosely scattered around the room, along with bags of chips, pop and pizza. It’s a setup that would make more sense for a party, were it not for everyone clustering around power cords and loud finger tapping of engineers ripping up their laptops.

Sticking to traditional hackathon culture, there was a whole lot of coding, lots of beer, and happy chit chat mixed with serious faces betraying some heavy problem solving, in a word: hackathon-fun!

In attendence: several experienced Eclipse submitters, students from SFU and UBC, and other Eclipse enthusiasts. Projects hacked on: JDT UI, Scripted, Orion and Mylyn (for project details see the wiki page).

It was great to have Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundataion attend and hack away with all the others. Great many ideas were thrown around and many a bug got fixed. Newbies got to learn a lot about Gerrit & Mylyn and how to contribute to open source. Thanx to all who attended and made the night that much better!

No, Mik is not joining politics nor has he started writing a book. Along with Paul Jacobs, David Kelley, Reid Hoffman, Ben Horowitz, Vinod Khosla, Neal Stephenson, Kara Swisher, Elon Musk, and approximately 90 others, he is a finalist in The World Technology Awards albeit in different categories.

When you look at the incredible names of this year’s finalists and past year’s winners and finalists, its an incredible list of who’s who. As a company, we take a great deal of pride that our CEO and co-founder, Mik Kersten, is a finalist and of course, we hope Mik wins. As a colleague, I am extremely gratified that Mik is being recognized. Mik has been an incredible evangelist and leader for Tasktop and for software professionals all over the world. In my mind, his management, leadership, and focus on company culture are some of the things that set Mik apart.

We are extremely thankful to the WTN in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, Technology Review and Science/AAAS for recognizing Mik’s accomplishments to date with this honor.

The other esteemed finalists in the IT Software Individual category included:

Today, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the Leading Moms event in Vancouver. I was blown away by the talks I heard, stories of women and moms changing the world from Vancouver be it setting up birthing centers in Uganda to the environmental and health improvements biotechnology can bring us.

I had the chance to speak on something about technology that personally resonates with me. The choice was easy. Eight or so years ago when Mik Kersten and I first started working on the ideas behind task-focused interfaces, my work days and in fact my life started to change. I chose to share some of those experiences by speaking about The Power of Tasks.

The basic concepts of actionable tasks, separated by categories with schedule and due dates can really make a difference in one’s productivity, in freeing one’s mind from the details to allow for creativity and in simply getting things done. This power of tasks is available to software developers through Mylyn and Tasktop Dev. One day in the future, hopefully every mom can also benefit from this technology to make their lives better.

As someone who has lived in and around the Austin entrepreneurial scene for nearly the past decade, I am very excited about this announcement. In all the companies that I’ve managed while living in Austin from SolarMetric to SpringSource to Lexcycle, this is the first time a company I’ve been involved with had a real physical presence in Austin. I am thrilled about this. I feel like Austin has given me so much over the years but for whatever reason, I’ve generally been a solo flyer in Austin in all of my previous companies. At SolarMetric, we had one other person in Austin but with SpringSource and Lexcycle, I was the only one here. When I joined Vancouver-headquartered Tasktop on a day-to-day basis 2 years ago, most of my fellow ATXers rolled their eyes as I had yet again managed not to work for an Austin company.

As it turns out, Tasktop is different, and this announcement of our new office is evidence of that difference. I am excited to have launched the new office with a couple of fabulous women prominent in the local scene, Nicole Bryan and Melanie Wise. We plan to grow the office in coming months and years as we build out our business development, marketing, sales operations, solutions and the other areas of the company that I get to work with on a day-to-day basis.

Austin also has a little known Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) mafia with many of Tasktop’s partners who participate in the software value chain having a presence in Austin making Austin a perfect place for Tasktop’s US Headquarters.

Austin has been a big part of my growth as an entrepreneur, a businessman and a person. For those familiar with my time in Austin especially in the local tech start-up scene, I am grateful to:

Brett for his timely and very important advice

Josh letting me squat in his offices and including me in Capital Factory as mentor helping me re-engage in Austin

Jonathan and our never-ending search for the ultimate breakfast taco

Lisa being so supportive of Tasktop, helping us grow out our presence in Austin

Kyle’s big heart and soul

Mark and Greg and being able to reconnect

and so many more people that I apologize I am not mentioning.

One of the biggest influences on me during my nine years here in Austin has been Bijoy. I learned about Bootstrap Austin and met Bijoy right after we moved. Bijoy and I have debated and imbibed and debated. Those debates (is it really a debate when 1 person keeps being right?) have challenged me and caused me to assess and reassess. Although my crazy hair has come and gone, Bijoy and his hair have been one of the constants. I’m very proud of the fact that Tasktop is still bootstrapped since its founding in 2007, and I suspect that fact gives me a little cred with my friend who has gotten me to care far more about the journey than the destination.

My very first Bootstrap meeting was at the IC2 Institute in 2003 – I believe Dr. Darius spoke. If I am not mistaken, that is where I met Chad Jewell who 9 years later, helped us find our new office (even though I hadn’t spoken to the guy in at least 5 years). That’s Austin.

Also, I’d like to thank Lynn at Expero and look forward to spending time with her team in our shared location.

There is nothing like leaving a place to really appreciate it, and I had the fortune of doing so when we did our brief 1 year dalliance in Seattle. We made many good friends in Seattle but it probably wasn’t fair. Had I moved to Seattle from other places I’ve lived e.g., Boston or Morristown or Chicago, I may have fallen for Seattle. But unfortunately, my foil was the ATX and that is a tough act to follow.

And of course the family. Austin is home – its where Sharon and I decided to pitch our tent, its where my kids were born, and its where I plan on spending my twilight years wearing bad shirts and someday, even worse pants.

This week produced a series of subtle hints that remind me why I truly enjoy being a woman in the technology industry, especially at Tasktop. We arranged a “Ladies of Tasktop” evening out. As we were devoured our fabulous chocolate desserts, we started to dig into a host of possible product ideas – and what caught all of our attention was that many of our ideas revolved around facilitating more visual interactions with the technologies we use in our day to day jobs.

We had a great time bantering back and forth about our opinions on why women (at least this group of women) seem to respond more naturally to visualizations and put greater emphasis on user interface in general.

Subtle Hint #1: Women often approach technology differently and the “ladies of Tasktop” have a great opportunity to influence next generation ALM interaction models.

The night before our dinner, I went to the Eclipse Demo Camp along with five of my fellow female Tasktopians. We saw great demos of new Eclipse technology but that is not what struck me since there are always cool demos at Demo Camp! What struck me was that multiple people mentioned how great it was that so many women worked at Tasktop – both in engineering and otherwise.

Subtle Hint #2:Â Tasktop has actively strived to create a culture and environment that values women throughout the organization. I am lucky to be a part of a company that values diversity and all sorts of different perspectives.

But I am not alone in my observations concerning the value and importance of women and the challenges and opportunities that they face. I recommend that you read the incredibly insightful and thought provoking Atlantic Monthly article Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,Â by Anne-Marie Slaughter. As I started considering the article in the context of this week, another realization struck me…

Subtle Hint #3:Â Having it all is largely dependent on your definition of “all” – At Tasktop, I am surrounded by an incredibly bright, innovative group of women – in a field that desperately needs more women to influence the future of our industry. And I have an amazing husband and two incredible kids at home. I think I have it “all”.

While I may not always feel at home as a woman in this predominantly male field, there are times that I feel quite lucky to have fallen into this field. This week was one of those weeks.